June 2009
5 posts
8 tags
Medill Ups Its Hacker Street Cred
Last week Medill’s WriteClick initiative announced some forward-looking projects that made me feel some pride in the progress my alma mater has made in the last few years.
The projects:
Tweedia, a widget that will allow readers to instantly see other relevant Twitter posts on news stories.
Machine Generated Sports Stories, a program that instantly “writes” stories about baseball games,...
Moving Past Textbooks
I feel compelled to reblog Seth’s Textbook Rant:
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There’s no serious insight or leap in...
Rethinking Emergency Services
Yesterday afternoon, I called 911. I observed an emergency unfolding, and figured it would be easy and fast to report on it.
I was wrong. The local 911 operator put me on hold for more than five minutes. I’m not sure how long I would have been on hold for, since I hung up.
And while muzak wasn’t playing, it might as well have been. In an emergency, every minute counts, and...
8 tags
One Protocol to Ping Them All
PubSubHubbub is a plug and play pubsub solution for App Engine deployment.
If you’re not even sure why you’d want pubsub over polling to begin with, the PubSubHubbub wiki has a page on Why Polling Sucks:
What’s wrong with feed updates every few minutes/hours/days?
It might be fine for reading your blogs (it’s obviously been fine for most people for years now), but...
Google Squared Is No Freebase-Killer
Now that the Google Squared site is public, it’s a little more clear that the site is comparable to a Freebase view.
Freebase has iteratively improved its View interface for a couple of years and super-classed it with the Bases feature, so it is generally more full-featured to Google Squared, although the responsive minimalism of Google Squared could make it a better interface for mobile...